Sunday, November 03, 2013

Winter is coming!

I woke up and got out of bed
reluctantly today early morning. The floor was freezing cold. After rushing to
bathroom in semi-darkness and knocking a plastic chair groggily on my return, I
again climbed on my bed and checked the time on my mobile. It was 6.20 am. I
pulled the sheets straight upto my forehead but could still feel the cold
weather. I went deeper inside my sheets and cuddled my cold legs. I decided to
sleep for more 10 minutes. That’s it.

Someone pushed me gently. I peeked
through a gap from under my sheets and saw my roommate getting out of the bed.

“It’s 7.45 am! We are going to be
late today!” she announced.

I woke up and sat straight. Was it
really that late? I checked my mobile for the correct time. My roommate was
right. We were indeed quite late today. Oh no. Not late for office. We
were late for the inevitable process of making our lunchboxes :-)

This is the scenario from last week
onwards. In Chandigarh, you can tell that the winter is approaching fast. We
have stopped switching on the fan in our room at night. By the time it is
morning, we think that nature must have switched on an invisible
air-conditioner while we were dozing off at midnight. Nobody wants to get up
early morning. Let the sun come out first and wait for it to spread its warm
sunshine in our flat. Then one of us will get up and wake up the rest
of the other sleepy heads. While brushing my teeth, I just don’t want to put my
hand under the freezing cold water from the tap of the sink. It’s freezing
cold!

The geyser is playing a spoilsport.
Its life time is probably over and the actual winter has not even started. And
hence it’s going to be a further round of arguments and accusations when the
landlord will come for next month’s rent. When we come out of office before 8
pm, I feel colder outside in the open. The story inside the office is
different. Folks come in my cubicle and declare that it is very cold out here.
Why? Because one of the openings of the central air conditioner is directly
above my cubicle. Nowadays, I am wearing my stole like a shawl and sitting on
my chair like a very lazy person. I just wonder, if at all Infosys will allow
me ever to bring dry twigs of trees, large and small branches, and thick logs,
lots of cardboard and old newspapers. Then I would be able to strike a
matchstick, start burning all the collected things one by one and
thereafter enjoy a bright burning campfire in my cubicle cozily. Then whenever
I would feel cold, I would just have to turn around, hold out my fingers
towards the campfire till they become toasty warm, turn back and start typing
again with faster speed:-)

My father insists me to buy some
winter blankets. I say yes every time to him but I still have to go and buy one
for myself. I and my roommate keep planning and postponing the purchase every
weekday. Whenever we think of going to a shop in lunch or in the late evening,
the communicator pops up with a message of share screen. And we get
stuck up and postpone our plans for the next day again! It doesn’t help either
that both of us have started coughing lately. Last week I had a severe throat
infection. So I started drinking warm water every morning along with a
tea-spoon of honey to get relief from the ache in my throat.

Though I shiver a lot in winters
and I know this upcoming winter won’t be any less cold, I still look eagerly
forward to it every year. This season is nostalgic and brings out childhood
memories. Winter is tougher to bear in Northern states. When I was small,
winters meant wearing hand-made sweaters at home. My aunts competed with each
other on how many sweaters each of them would make this time. Sweaters
used to be soft, sometimes scratchy and made with lots of affection and love.
My grandfather purchased jackets for us. If I didn’t like the colour, I used to
exchange it with my brother. Adults wore neatly designed shawls. The look of
these shawls which was contrasting from the clothes worn, made me attracted to
this piece of fabric since childhood. Noses used to turn red and lips would
become dry. Ginger tea and hot milk used to be available nearly always in the
kitchen. And what to say about winter weddings now! In such weddings, people
wore branded clothes and refused to wear any jackets or shawls. If they wore
any such thing, will their designer dresses be visible? Until they started
shivering and got scolded for their stupidity by an elder, nobody used to touch
a sweater. Come snow or hailstorm, people faced winters in their designer
clothes at weddings with lots of shivering and cursing.

Childhood winters were so good.
Whenever the temperature falls down too low, schools and colleges in Uttar
Pradesh declare winter holidays. My little cousins enjoy and ask me to
join them. I tell them that unfortunately, Chandigarh doesn’t have any snowfall
and winter vacations are out of the question when I have become a professional.
They grumble and ask me to fake that I have become ill and remain ‘absent’. I
am forced to remind them that I am not in school anymore to do such things!

I wish I were Lucy Pevensie. Then I
would have gotten an opportunity to have an adventure in the snowy mountains of
Narnia. Or Kevin Maccalister from Home Alone. That would have landed me in lots
of mischievous adventures indeed. Or I wish that I was Jack Sparrow and riding
across different oceans on my very own Black Pearl. Or Harry Potter. Then
I would have taken out my wand, make sweaters and blankets appear out of thin
air in my cubicle, petrified the whole campus and gone on to take a very long
lazy nap! Or I just wish that I was in my hometown. Then I would have been
drinking very hot ginger tea right now and planning trips to different places
even when it was so foggy outside that trains were getting cancelled, flights
delayed and we were shivering and wearing fluffy hand-made sweaters
:-) ​